NCI Awards $3.1M for Development of Breast Cancer Risk Model

A team of Mayo researchers, led by Amy Degnim, MD, a breast surgeon in Rochester, and Mark Sherman, MD, an epidemiologist and laboratory medicine and pathology researcher in Jacksonville, has received a $3.1 M grant from the National Cancer Institute to develop a breast cancer prediction model to help guide clinical care for women whose breast biopsies show benign breast disease (BBD), noncancerous changes in the breast that may—or may not—go on to develop into breast cancer.  Mayo Clinic published the first risk report for these women more than 20 years ago, categorizing patients with BBD as high, medium, or low risk for developing breast cancer.  But advances in screening techniques that catch more details in breast changes, new information about the relevance of breast tissue characteristics such as density, the development of big data and machine learning techniques to conduct risk assessment and prediction, and the ready availability of molecular biomarker and cell genetics analysis, all of which have occurred over the past two decades, will contribute to a new risk model that incorporates a vastly wider array of risk factors.  Additionally, the new model will combine information from 7,000 patients at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, with that of an established cohort of 4,000 African-American women established by the Karmanos Cancer Institute, to provide a fuller understanding of ethnoracial breast cancer risk factors.  From Advancing the Science